The woman drew herself up to her full though still somewhat diminutive height, her eyes flashing like silvery beams –It’s the sunlight, dammit!Calvin insisted to himself – and her voice rocketed up the musical scales as she spoke.
“If you have no tribute to offer me after daring to violate my waters,” she screeched, “and no satisfactory answer to my riddle, then I have no choice but toplace a curse upon your head!”
A curse?Calvin just had time to think, before the woman raised her hands above her head, her hair swirling, and then –
Another flash of light, even brighter this time, sent him sprawling to the ground, and he barely had the presence of mind to grab his shoes and socks before scrambling out of the clearing and back up the path at lightning speed, her eerie laughter echoing through the forest behind him.
It was a long time before he slowed down enough to put his shoes back on – he didn’t stop until he’d made it back out to the main trail, and even then he was looking back over his shoulder.
Stopping briefly, he sat down on the ground and gave his shifter healing a minute to deal with the scratches on his feet, waiting for his pounding heart and heaving chest to return to something approaching normal.
What… what was that?!
Had he actually been cursed? Doubtful. If there was one thing that his parents had been insistent about when he was growing up, it was the non-existence of curses. The conversation had come about after his older brother had said that he’d cursed a then five-year-old Calvin to turn into a frog at midnight, and Calvin, in tears, had clambered onto his dad’s lap and begged him to reverse it.
Whilethatparticular situation had obviously been a bit different, his parents had stood firm over the years: curses weren’t real. And they’d been honest about the things in the shifter and magical worlds thatwerereal, so he had no reason to think otherwise.
“That flash of light was just the sun reflecting off the spring waters,” Calvin muttered to himself, slumping back.
Pulling his socks and boots on over his now-healed feet, he started to head back toward the car. He’d had enough of this section of the woods – he wanted to get back to a track thathadn’tbeen closed off. Perhaps it had been done with good reason.
Like weirdos making prank videos in the woods. Well, let’s hope they got some good footage and go home now. I’m sure I’ll be able to catch myself running scared into the woods on YouTube soon enough.
Feeling foolish, he made it back to the head of the trail in half the time it’d taken to get out there. There was still a lingering feeling of doom hanging over his head, and he laughed uneasily.
Fine. Flying can wait for another day.
As he approached his car, he pulled out his phone, planning to pull up some information on campsites in the area – the more popular and near major settlements, the better – when he realized it was dead. There wasn’t the faintest glimmer of life, even when he pressed all the buttons and held them down. The screen was as black as night.
Huh,he thought.IknowI charged it before I set out.
Then again, there were probably dead spots in the mountains, so maybe the battery had gotten run down in the search for a signal.
Oh, well,he thought.I know where the main road is – if I follow it, I’ll reach a town eventually. If absolutely all else fails, I know I can head back down the mountain.
Reaching for his keys, he glanced down at his hand – and at the unresponsive Fitbit on his wrist.
A vague feeling of dread – no, notdread, just confusion and concern – rippled through his stomach.
Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing to dread. It’s a flat battery. And IknowI haven’t charged it in a while.
Hopping into the car, he slid into the seat with a sigh of relief. Whatever weirdness was going on here, he was going to be far away from it soon enough. There was still plenty of time to salvage his vacation. And, if nothing else, he’d have a funny story to tell his family later on.
He turned his key in the ignition.
He turned it again.
He turned itagain.
The engine wasn’t even turning over. It was so silent that Calvin could hear the key twisting in the ignition as he tried it again, and then again. Not even a tragic, choking sound as the engine gave up the ghost.Nothing.
You havegotto be kidding me,he thought, turning it yet again.I don’t believe this. There’s no such thing as curses.
And yet, here he was, with a dead cell phone, a dead Fitbit, and now, it seemed, a dead car.
It’s not dead,he told himself without much conviction, even as another turn of the key proved to be fruitless.It’s just being a bit slow to wake up.
If he was going to be honest with himself, though… yeah, the car was dead. Not just struggling, not just on its last legs, but one hundred percent non-functional. The turn of the key wasn’t eliciting so much as a whimper from the engine. Where it had roared to life perfectly healthily this morning, now it was as silent as the tomb.
